Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/79

 shores of the Bosphorus and the honey-colored coasts of the Dardanelles.

The shock of defeat in the Balkan Wars turned the Young Turks in the direction of nationalism. Their subject races had never been amalgamated, and now that Greeks, Armenians and even Arabs were developing racial consciousnesses of their own, efforts at amalgamation were hopelessly tardy. Ottomanization had swiftly broken down into Turkification which became a bitter business of force and only drove the races of the Empire farther apart. But the only alternative to Turkification was the abandonment of the Empire and with it the Caliphate of Islam. Still borne down by the heavy responsibilities whose faithful discharge Islam expected of them, the Old Turks clung tenaciously to the Caliphate but the Young Turks, while refraining from a break with Islam, moved increasingly out of the grip of old religious usage toward a new Western nationalism.

There was much that was fine in their crude nationalism. It prized its own Turkish culture. It attempted to purge its language of its borrowed Persian and Arabic vocabulary. It sought to open up the resources of Western literatures by copious translations into Turkish. It even translated the Koran although in so doing it ran close to an open break with Islam, which counts it a sin to print the Koran in any language but the sacred language of Arabic. It broke down the barriers which fence off the enormous religious endowments of Islam, and the Ministry of Evkaf supplied funds to start a national library and to subsidize a national architecture. It started schools and began reforms in